Peel Castle, Isle of Man, Winter 1446
Peel Castle, Isle of Man, Winter
I AM SICK for a long time. I let them nurse me; I let them feed me like a baby.
My throat is so raw from screaming that all I can swallow are soups and gruels and they keep the peat fire glowing night and day as the world outside turns white in the morning from frost. Later, the woman closes the wooden shutters on snow and caulks the gaps with twine and tallow.
I make no effort to speak to her, and at Christmas, she leaves and is replaced by another.
They change quarter day on quarter day. I call them all Mary; I forget why.
None of them know what happened during the long night that they left me in an underground prison behind a locked door but found me the next morning soaking wet, sea wrack in my hair, bruised, bloodied, and nearly drowned. Glegg never again asks me what happened, and I want to forget.
But that night has made a difference. I understand that I will never escape from here; I understand that I will never be released, and I recognise that the punishment is just. For the first time, I acknowledge to myself the list of sins that I have excused or ignored or blamed on others.
I did shout down my dying mother and disobey her last wish.
I did take my lady’s husband and I did desert her.
I did marry a weak man hoping he would kill the man I love.
The only true love I have ever known is turned into murderous hatred.
I did call up a devil to kill a king. I did lie with a devil, miscarry his baby, and embrace a corpse.
I know myself now, and though I am imprisoned for life, for the first time I am free. I am myself; without pretence.
Glegg comes one day in winter to tell me that my father has died, and I turn my face away from his dark worried face and say nothing. ‘You can come to church and have a mass said for him,’ he offers. ‘Light a candle?’
I shake my head. A mass from a creature like me will hardly help my father to Heaven.
‘Well, we’ll say a mass for him anyway,’ he says uncertainly and goes out.
Glegg’s job is to keep me alive in complete safety and isolation, not to kill me.
He has a bad winter, thinking that I might die; but he does not know the power of my will.
I am not going to die here, from a drowning in the dark.
I am not going to die from the cold; I am not going to die from the loneliness.
I have the will of the devil himself. The roar of the sea and the faceless kiss of a drowned man are not going to kill me.